The Conservative Party loses two more previously ‘safe’ by-elections, and it is seen as a matter of course. The results support another poll this week from Survation on behalf of the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), which is concerned with the rural vote. The headline finding is Labour will beat the Tories in the 100 most rural constituencies in England. The Tories currently hold 96 of them, but their vote share is expected to fall to 34% – down 25 points since the 2019 election. Meanwhile Labour is polling at 37%. So on these figures, the Tories would lose more than half of those seats.
Most interesting for this region is that the execrated Therese Coffey would lose her seat in Suffolk Coastal. She cuts a disconsolate figure, slouching around Woodbridge in her down-at-heel shoes, but seems to have no awareness of how far she is discredited or why. In this lack of self-awareness she is reminiscent of her great friend Liz Truss (SW Norfolk).
So what are the prospects of Dr Coffey being defenestrated? Suffolk Coastal is in many ways a weathervane seat for political alliances or tactical voting. But there is no love lost between Labour and the other opposition parties, and little sign of any of the parties having the stomach for a fight. If Dr Coffey is still there after the next general election, then the opposition parties in that seat deserve our contempt.
Still, East Anglia Bylines hopes to make this one of the seats we will cover in depth come the election. Expect daily gossip and shocking revelations in our election blog.
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Mention of Liz Truss as always prompts your correspondent to remind you, dear reader, that her brief and cataclysmic period in office knocked £425 billion off pension funds’ assets. That, remember, is your pension fund. In simple terms, it means about £7,000 for every man, woman and child in this country.
Once the present shower are thrown out, one hopes fervently that not one of their hubristic fallacies will be forgiven. Groups of responsible and law-abiding citizens should see it as their obligation to scrutinise attempts at remaking themselves outside parliament, and ensure that not one of these egotistical monsters ever occupies a place in public life again.
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Here is Liz Truss, writing to her voters this week and hoping they will overlook how her hubris has forced them into penury, and instead trying to deflect them into joining the Tories’ culture wars. Of all the catastrophic events she could write about, she chooses transgender politics. That, she pretends to believe, is highest of their priorities. She doesn’t claim her proposed bill will make a difference, in which case, why is she writing about it? It is a private members bill and so has almost no chance of being granted parliamentary time. But she hopes she can mislead the voters into believing this is something more than the pathetic and dishonest attempt to hoodwink them which it clearly is.
But just in case public lavatories aren’t your go-to gripe of the moment, she adds a ragbag of others – two of which are directly caused by her government and the other of which she cannot possibly influence. It goes without saying that on no account should you respond in any way to the letter. It is merely an excuse for ‘data harvesting’: grabbing your details so she can bombard you with further misleading claims.
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The weekend’s media were much taken up with which of the country’s wheels will fall off next. We seem to be suffering from boiled frog syndrome. So much has been going wrong for so long we don’t realise just how close to the precipice we have been pushed.
For this correspondent, the most compelling issue was brought up by Jay Rayner in the Observer. We may be facing starvation. The government is driving farmers out of business, so we can’t feed ourselves. Imports are being strangled by self-imposed red tape, so also making food more expensive. Yet import procedures are also so ineffectual that criminal gangs are queueing up to ship in food that should be condemned.
Corrupt, incompetent, small-minded and distrustful, how long before we begin hanging monkeys as French spies?
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Kemi Badenoch (Saffron Walden) continues to attract the kind of headlines which fortunately are unlikely to help her become Conservative Party leader. This week we learn she met Fujitsu, providers of the disgraceful Horizon Post office computer system, while in Davos. Her civil servants warned her of the ongoing problems with the contract, but she failed to bring them up with the company. Instead. their conversation appears to have been aimed squarely at trying to stuff Fujitsu’s coffers with more of our public money.
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And still on Kemi Badenoch, East Anglia Bylines’s own Professor Jacob Öberg hands her son cul sur une assiette on her most recent false claims regarding the latest vaunted mini deals with US states. Jacob is dismissive.
“These so-called ‘mini deals’ are not trade agreements”, he points out. “They are memorandums of understanding and not in any way legally enforceable. They offer absolutely zero to UK biz”.
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So we turn if we must to Priti Patel (Witham). This is yet another scandal involving government incompetence and perhaps worse. This week it has been highlighted that in 2019, thousands of overseas students were deported and threatened with arrest and detention if they stayed. It concerned a row about unfair cheating allegations, involving a complication over visas. Sajid Javid was the home secretary on whose desk the problem fell. It was accepted by the Home Office that students “may have been treated harshly” and that it was “a real concern” to them.
Mr Javid put together a scheme which looked to solve the problem, but he was sacked by Boris Johnson when he became prime minister and replaced by Ms Patel. After that, “no-one was very keen on the idea”. The government’s failure to act has cost the students thousands of pounds in lost fees and has left them for the last decade in despair, trying to clear their names.
Ms Patel has yet to comment.
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Now this is curious, and a good example of why we should always treat polls circumspectly. Waveney Valley is a new constituency, along the Suffolk–Norfolk border. The Greens did well in this territory in last year’s council elections, taking Mid Suffolk Council. So they have taken those results ward by ward from the old seats, and pieced them together to make the new one. Their figures – checked by East Anglia Bylines – show that on that basis they could have 43% of the vote, with the Tories on 34% and Labour on 11%. This was a council election, quite different from choosing an MP, but one can understand their confidence.
But the local press don’t think they have a chance. The New Statesman on the other hand believes they have strong prospects. Whereas Electoral Calculus gives them just a 1% prospect of victory. Which is interesting, since until recently, Electoral Calculus gave them precisely 0% chance of winning.
This discrepancy between actual votes cast in the local elections and computer calculations seems a puzzle, and East Anglia Bylines has taken it up with Electoral Calculus. Their full analysis suggests the Tories have a 62% chance, with Labour having 35%. This is in spite of Labour only having one councillor, and having yet to choose their parliamentary candidate.
So East Anglia Bylines will also be watching Waveney Valley closely come the election.
Meanwhile, last Saturday your diarist joined a happy 80-strong band of Greens at Bungay with their Waveney Valley candidate, Adrian Ramsay, who is also one of the party’s joint leaders. You will not be surprised to hear that the assembly were contemptuous of any reports which suggest they will not sweep all before them.
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The Eastern Daily Press do seem to have it in for Brandon Lewis (Gt Yarmouth) – at last, one might add, but anyway a hat tip to them. The newspaper calls this gentleman ‘Seven Jobs Lewis’ and points out that he earns £487,000 pa, some of it from dubious Russian sources.
This report came about as a result of a Labour motion to limit severance payments to ministers losing their jobs. Lewis received £33,000 after his resignation as Northern Ireland secretary during the Johnson defenestration, then was appointed as justice secretary by Liz Truss, before being sacked when she went. (Presumably trousering more moolah.)
Naturally the motion was lost, but among those of the region’s MPs who voted against limiting severance payments to themselves and their colleagues were Jerome Mayhew (Broadland), Duncan Baker (N Norfolk), George Freeman (Mid Norfolk), Chloe Smith (Norwich N) and Peter Aldous (Waveney).
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After which it is a delight to write more about Lord Ipswich, David Anderson KC, formerly the government’s anti-terrorism czar. Though a cross-bench peer, since his ennoblement his lordship and his chums have been a constant irritation to the government. This week he was part of the Lords debate on Rwanda, which showed up the government’s incompetence once more. It seems that when they claim Rwanda is a safe place to send refugees, they mean it might be safe at some as yet undefined point in future. But they have done nothing to make that the case yet.
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Still in the Lords, it falls once more to Lord Deben, formerly John Gummer, MP for Suffolk Coastal, to play the role of the small boy pointing out the emperor has no clothes.
“There is very little actually Conservative about the Conservative Party anymore”, he says. “Populist. English nationalist. Yes. Conservative – no.”
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“I have never known Labour to be so disciplined”, one of the party’s regional doyens remarks to Pecksniff, perhaps tongue in cheek. The subject was Brexit, and for ‘disciplined’ read ‘terrified to speak out of turn’. An entire party cowed into silence over the greatest failure of the political class in our lifetime. Party members complain to this diarist of bullying. (Incidentally, similar charges of stifling dissent and bullying are also emerging from among the Liberal Democrats.)
Where is the freewheeling band of brothers Pecksniff remembers from earlier days in the Labour Party? Where is the delight of looking forward to the pub after canvassing, with Andy Phelps and Richard Risebrow and the others? It seems that one of present Labour’s most egregious sins is that it’s no fun any more.
But then, can you imagine the Liberal Democrats larging it down the pub? And can you imagine the Greens even being in the pub? British politics has become more like the Jehovah’s Witnesses. No wonder we’re in a bloody mess.
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“Labour candidate to be Southend MP blasts ‘decade of inaction’ on sewage-dumping”, reads a press release received this week. The candidate is one Bayo Alaba, who shows the pleasing trait of not pissing about. In all the hoo-ha about sewage, let’s not forget that Southend is frequently up to its fetlocks in faeces, with both its MPs hopelessly compromised.
Mr Alaba is also pressing Labour to outlaw bonuses to water company bosses who allow illegal sewage spills. This is braver than one might imagine since, as the above entry suggests, Labour candidates aren’t necessarily encouraged to think for themselves. So bravo to Bayo.
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Last week Pecksniff reported on a public meeting held by Duncan Baker (N Norfolk), to discuss flooding at Hickling. Mr Baker thought he had a safe seat, but it now transpires that his voters actually expected him to do more than just suck up to the party whips. So this was his attempt to be a man of the people. But it didn’t go altogether well, and Mr Baker subsequently blamed “fanatics” for “hijacking” the meeting, claiming that police had to be called to suppress the disorder.
Sad to say, Mr Baker is now being accused of not telling the truth. A letter from one in the audience points out that a report in the Eastern Daily Press prior to Mr Baker’s claims wrote that “hundreds attend flooding crisis meeting in Hickling”. And the BBC reported that “villagers unimpressed despite crunch sewage meeting”.
(“Crunch sewage meeting?” Surely that should be “Splash”. Anyway, we digress.)
There is no mention of police in either report, you will notice. Now, it would be a poor hack indeed who covered a public sewage meeting but missed the bit where plod wades in, so to speak, with truncheons flailing. So in the circumstances it would be fair to assume – one puts it no stronger – that it didn’t actually happen. That leaves Mr Baker in an unhappy place, caught here avec le pantalon descendu.
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Thanks this week go to James Porter.
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